I have been wondering about the rock-headed persistence of that 33 percent of Americans who continue to approve of Bush's performance. In light of all the evidence, how could they continue to hold the Boy Emperor in high regard?
The only conclusion I can reach is that they must have some kind of disease. Let's conduct a mini-diagnosis: Irrational? Lack of memory? Brain-wasting syndrome? Carnivorous? Texan?
Of course, that's it. They must all have vCJD, the human cousin of mad cow disease.
Apparently if you are a Republican, "fuck" is something you say and only rarely do.
Clinton's lack of public obscenity, his mature libido, and his sense of discretion seem so much more adult than the behavior of this kindergarten class we call the Bush administration.
Under an arrangement with Enron's board, Lay could repay his loans from the company with Enron stock. By August 2001, after Jeff Skilling resigned as chief executive, [Joanne] Cortez said she noticed Lay used stock to repay the entire $4 million on the credit line with stock, then borrowed the same amount the next day. The pattern of borrowing and repaying with stock continued into the fall, Cortez said.
"It made me question if this was being used as somewhat of a tool to sell shares," she said.
Bingo. More specifically, Lay was using it to convert his Enron stock into cash, to monetize his holdings, which were falling in value. Normally, a corporate officer would have to report stock sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission, but by selling shares back to the issuer, Lay wasn't required to.
It's a simple system: Borrow $4 million. Repay with a worthless asset whose value is determined by propped-up market perceptions. Repeat day after day after day.
Ken Lay borrowed $77 million and paid it back in Beanie Babies.
Cortez's story is heartbreaking. She kept a secret log of Ken Lay's "transactions," never selling her own Enron stock because she was afraid that her knowledge of Lay's activity constituted her being considered an inside trader.
This happened in 2001, the same year that Ken Lay was having his secret energy policy meetings with the former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney.
Top-down class warfare, at least in its current Republican guise, simultaneously depends upon and crushes the faith and goodwill of ordinary people like Joanne Cortez who are trying to do the right thing, even as their leaders fuck them over sixteen different ways. Nowadays we see it everywhere in the US, but especially in finance, in foreign policy, and in religion.
As the government wound down its case this morning, it left jurors with a taste of the large salaries Lay and Skilling raked in — almost $375 million between them — as the company slipped into bankruptcy.
Skilling earned more than $151.7 million from Enron Corp. from 1999 to 2001, the year he resigned and the company collapsed. He also sold stock for more than $41 million.
In the same three years, Lay earned more than $222.8 million from the company. The indictment spans 1999 through 2001.
Enron employees lose their life savings. Arthur Andersen employees, tens of thousands of them who had nothing to do with Enron, lose their jobs. Institutional portfolios that invest American retirement and pension assets lose billions when Enron goes under.
Meanwhile, Jeff and Kenny Boy grab a quarter-billion dollars each.
Seriously, how much more does anyone need to know?
Fire them both. The MBA president and his poodle made a hash of their little adventure (NYT): "The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was 'unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.' Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment."
Owners walking their pets often resemble one another. When Owner takes a wrong turn, Pet is there to wag its tail in agreement.
Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.
The problem with this logic is that, if citizens and shareholders start thinking this way in a more general sense, we will demand accountability from everyone who manages anything of ours — from CEOs who effectively manage our retirement assets to presidents and vice presidents who manage our fiscal health as a nation. In these situations, the stakes are considerably higher than in a garden-variety hedge fund, so if anything the level of accountability should be raised to meet the seriousness of the situations they manage.
Therefore, we should send Bush-Cheney an invoice for the $2 trillion they squandered as a result of their mismanagement of the United States of America.
Glisan described as "ugly" a meeting in late 2001 in The Woodlands, TX, where top executives described Enron's dour financial straits.
Heads of the various business units who were at the meeting were accustomed to touting their financial success and growth. But this time they detailed in a roundtable discussion their mounting losses and grim outlook.
"It was ugly," said Glisan, who was in attendance at the meeting being run by Ken Lay.
Glisan recalled for jurors the comments of meeting attendee John Lavorato, at the time a high-ranking executive for Enron North America.
"He made the comment that he was glad he didn't have a gun or he would shoot himself," Glisan said.
Shoot himself? In fact, another "high-ranking executive" of Enron North America, the former chairman and chief executive and Skilling's self-proclaimed "best friend," did exactly that in January 2002.
True, and we also have better food than the UK, last time I checked. And at over 9 million people, the Chicago area ranks two spots higher on the world city population scale than greater London.
Vitality indeed. If the media in Chicago had less of an inferiority complex, we would be writing about you as if London were some sort of discovered frontier.
If enacted, the bill would significantly ease the rules governing so-called Morris Trust transactions, which restrict how certain corporate deals can be structured to avoid taxes.
Wall Street -- led by firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Bear Stearns Cos., and Merrill Lynch & Co. -- is hoping that making it easier to do tax-free transactions will spur more deals. [...]
The bill's prospects aren't clear yet, though its sponsor, Virginia Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, is well-positioned to push it. Rep. Cantor is the House's chief deputy majority whip and the only member of the Republican leadership on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax legislation.
[...]
Wall Street has been a reliable source of support for Rep. Cantor. In his three terms in Congress, the securities and investment industries have been among his biggest campaign contributors, donating $282,350, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. "To tie contributions to legislation is just backward," Mr. [Rob] Collins [Rep. Cantor's chief of staff] said.
Rep. Cantor's wife, Diana, is a former vice president at Goldman, one of the lead banks pushing for the legislative action.
The proposed legislation would change the rules to help corporations avoid the 35% corporate income tax in merger transactions. The Joint Committee on Taxation hasn't yet said how much Mr. Cantor's bill could cost the government in lost revenue.
Disney and Alltel have already used the existing loopholes to avoid the 35% corporate tax. Cantor's big innovation is to eliminate the requirements that Disney and Alltel had to meet, thus ensuring that no tax is ever paid and the US Treasury is depleted more rapidly.
Personally, I believe in the death penalty, but I would reserve it especially for crimes of dispassion like these.
"...I was told I was being replaced as chief accounting officer of Enron North America because I was not capable of making aggressive accounting decisions."
[Wanda] Curry testified she was told of the move by Cliff Baxter, who shot himself to death when Enron collapsed.
My earlier speculations about all this appear here.
This is in contrast with the bizarre blog of Houston defense attorney Tom Kirkendall, who seems to obsess more about prosecutorial misconduct than about managerial misconduct. The latter, of course, destroyed careers and vast amounts of wealth, but he seems to relish picking the nits.
1. Single-payer is a simple plan that can be explained in short, compelling phrases. 2. It's good policy. 3. It gives Democrats a branding tool. 4. The political landscape is slowly moving in our favor. 5. It's possible to win this battle.
Case closed as far as I'm concerned. If we had passed even a flawed Hillarycare system in 1994, we would have had a dozen years to work out all the kinks by now.
Meanwhile, I'm paying $12,000 a year out of pocket for a fucked-up Blue Cross HMO in which it takes a week to have an orthopedic specialist look at my wife's fractured arm.
Providence Equity Partners Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s investment arm have agreed to purchase Education Management Corp. for $3.4 billion, Education Management said, as increased access to federal funding improves the prospects of for-profit trade schools and universities.
Education Management runs 72 primary campuses across the U.S. and Canada, training its 72,000 enrolled students in fields such as fashion, psychology and Web-site design. It also runs a small but growing operation providing online instruction.
For-profit education has become a growth business in the U.S., as tuition costs at traditional nonprofit colleges and universities soar. New students also are choosing to take their courses online, a more convenient and more profitable method. [...]
Like the media industry, the for-profit education business is seeking to benefit from new distribution methods. As classes move online, education companies gain the ability to sell their content to a wider number of customers. The costs of adding students decline in that environment, making the profit margins more attractive.
But the transaction also comes at a time when for-profit colleges and universities -- which generate almost $18 billion in annual revenue -- face mounting regulatory scrutiny for issues from overly aggressive sales tactics to the quality of their academic offerings. In many cases, traditional colleges and universities have refused to accept credits students earn at for-profit schools, arguing their academic standards aren't high enough. Meanwhile, the regional commissions that approve course work at traditional schools have generally refused to do so with for-profit schools.
And, like the media industry (think cable news and the big dailies) and of course the Republican party, the for-profit education industry has learned that there is an enormous amount of profit to be gained by purveying total crap.
Even if nonprofit schools are often inefficient, at least we know their primary priority isn't the strip-mining of students' (and parents') wallets.
Why would Goldman Sachs be willing to pay over $47,000 for each enrolled student? Because they're more interested in extracting money from students than educating them. The unique combination of heightened investor profit and lowered academic standards prove the point.
...the jury heard from a former Enron employee who lost his retirement savings when the company collapsed.
John Sides, 52, a 22-year veteran of Enron, said he trusted Lay's promises enough to make investments based on them. On questioning from prosecutor Robb Adkins, Sides told the jury "I relied on Ken Lay."
Sides said he has since thrown out all his retirement documents "because they were too depressing."
The jury never heard how much Sides lost because Lay's lawyers requested that details about employees' losses be banned from the trial because they are too prejudicial. Lake ruled these details could not be presented in evidence.
But it has been reported that Sides, of Houston, saw his 401(k) worth about $500,000 dwindle to $4,000 when the company collapsed.
John Sides relied on Ken Lay enough to see a 99% loss on his savings. And yet we're supposed to feel sorry for Ken Lay, who has an alleged net worth of $650,000?
That, of course, doesn't factor in the value of his variable annuities which are protected from bankruptcy proceedings. Ken and Linda Lay will be expected to scrape by on the income from those investments, which will be a meager $912,000 per yearfor life, starting in 2007.
